Reviews & Musings

An Introduction: Who I Am and Why I’m Here

This website has been a long time coming, honestly. I’ve been reading manga since childhood, I’ve written reviews for other sites, and now I am the manga buyer and manager at a comic book store in Boston. As part of my duties, I often advise a couple groups of comics retailers on their manga buying, and I keep feeling like I want to be able to dispense that advice on a somewhat larger scale.

I can’t claim that I know all there is to know about manga, but I am confident in the knowledge that I have, and I know it is specialized enough to be of use to others. So at least in part, I hope that my reviews and ramblings are helpful for retailers, but also to publishers and consumers.

Beyond that, I just really love manga. I am deeply interested in its history and its production, both within and outside of Japan. I was lucky enough to be a young teenager in the early aughts, so my pop cultural experience was very much embroiled in the Cool Japan zeitgeist. Basically, I never had a chance!

So what will you see here? My reviews will mostly skew toward less-popular titles, partially because I like and read a broad and strange array of manga, and partially because a series like One Piece will never need my help getting sales. I will also focus a lot on work by women, because again, the men don’t need my help. In terms of genre, you can expect a little bit of everything, save perhaps hardcore hentai (though I will review adult works). The manga will be a mix of old and new works, because there will always be a soft spot in my heart for anything that came out while I was a teen — and besides, there’s some good vintage work out there!

Outside of the reviews, I will try to pop by with interesting little manga-related tidbits from my life, or my opinions on current goings-on in the manga and anime world. I may also occasionally bring up non-manga graphic novels and maybe even some prose fiction or non-fiction that I think is relevant to manga in some way. My intention is for this site, like all projects, to grow and change as I do, and as I gain more readers who want certain content.

So thank you all for being here, and for starting on me with this adventure!